Research

The LCS program, funded by the National Science Foundation, is designed to promote collaboration among five existing research clusters at Penn. Here we briefly describe these clusters, their faculty and their unique properties. Please click on the text to page down to the corresponding description.

• Neurobiological and Field Study of Animal Communication
• Behavioral Study of Human Language Use and Acquisition
• The Neural Basis of Human Communication
• Computational, Mathematical and Formal Analysis of Language Structure, Use & Change
• Enhanced Communication Environments and Systems

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Neurobiological and Field Study of Animal Communication

Faculty: Cheney, Schmidt, Seyfarth & White
Researchers in this area are committed to an ethological approach that studies animal communication in its natural social context. Notable examples include Cheney’s and Seyfarth’s current research on the communication and social behavior of wild baboons, in which field vocalization playback techniques are used to document baboons’ response to vocalizations in a range of environmental settings. Birds' complex communicative and social behaviors are studied by both Schmidt and White, again crucially in interactive settings. For example, White has developed a novel technique of using remote-controlled robotic cowbirds to produce calls and subtle social behaviors as stimuli to aviary birds, and Schmidt now records brain responses from freely behaving birds as they listen to others' songs.
Here are links to labs in this research cluster:

• Animal Behavior Lab (David White, Director)
• BirdSong Lab (Marc Schmidt, Director)
• Animal Field Research (Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, Directors)

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Behavioral Study of Human Language Use and Acquisition

Faculty: Dahan, Gleitman, Joshi, Massey, Swingley & Trueswell
This research area is concerned with the dynamics of human communication in natural settings and how these abilities are learned and used by children to acquire their native language. Trueswell, known for his work on real-time spoken language comprehension, and Gleitman, known for her research on child language acquisition, have recently teamed up to study the development of child sentence comprehension abilities. This group was the first to develop eyetracking during listening techniques for children, in which they hear spoken instructions to act on the world. Chidlren’s eyegaze patterns allow researchers to infer the dynamics of language interpretation in real time, as each spoken utterance unfolds.
Here are some links to labs in this research cluster:

• Eye Movement and Lexical Processing Laboratory (Delphine Dahan, Director)
• Language Development and Processing Lab (John Trueswell and Lila Gleitman, Directors)
• PENNlincs program of Massey and colleagues (Chris Massey, Director)

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The Neural Basis of Human Communication

Faculty: Botvinick, Chatterjee, Coslett, Embick, Farah, Grossman, Jha, Kahana, Thompson-Schill
A large cognitive neuroscience community at Penn is interested in human communication and its relation to other cognitive functions including learning and memory, conflict resolution, and cognitive control. A strength of this group of investigators is their reliance on convergent evidence from a large number of methodologies, including (a) analysis of cognitive performance in individuals either with chronic impairments in patients with permanent brain damage (Chatterjee, Coslett, Grossman, Thompson-Schill) or with temporary impairments in normal subjects resulting from pharmacological manipulations (Farah) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (Coslett); (b) recording of neural activity in normal volunteers and brain-damaged patients using fMRI (Botvinick, Chatterjee, Coslett, Embick, Farah, Grossman, Jha, Thompson-Schill), ERP (Jha, Kahana), and scalp and depth electrode recording (in presurgical patients; Kahana); and (c) computational simulations of normal and impaired cognition with biologically-informed models (Botvinick, Farah, Kahana).
Participating labs include:

• Botvinick Lab (Matthew Botvinick, Director)
• ChatLab of Cognitive Neurology (Anjan Chatterjee, Director)
• Coslett Lab (Branch Coslett, Director)
• Embick Lab (David Embick, Director)
• Farah Lab (Martha Farah, Director)
• Grossman Lab (Murray Grossman, Director)
• Jha Lab (Amishi Jha, Director)
• Computational Memory Lab (Michael Kahana, Director)
• Thompson-Schill Lab (Sharon Thompson-Schill, Director)

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Computational, Mathematical and Formal Analysis of Language Structure, Use & Change

Faculty: Clark, Embick, Joshi, Kroch, Labov, Liberman, Marcus, Pereira, Ringe, Sankoff, & Weinstein
This research can be divided into two areas. The first, corresponding to the traditional discipline of linguistics, investigates how the structures of human language map sounds to meanings, and the how these mappings differ with communicative situation and historical, geographical, and social setting. The second area, corresponding to computational linguistics, develops representations and algorithms for computational language analysis, interpretation, and use, and for automatically learning representations and processing methods from appropriate data.
Some research operations associated with this cluster are:

• Linguistic Data Consortium
• Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English
• PropBank
• The Xtag Project
• Machine Learning at Penn

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Enhanced Communication Environments and Systems

Faculty: Badler, Joshi, Kearns & Pereira
Researchers in this area work on technologies that promote new ways of communicating. Kearns and colleagues build and study speech-based systems that are adaptive, and provide multi-modal, multi-user social interaction. Badler and others work on the design and application of graphical human modeling and simulation, especially for human-computer interfaces. These groups are especially interested in how contextual factors change and dynamically influence dialogue, including the generation of machine utterances and the interpretation of utterances produced by humans.

• Center for Human Modeling and Simulation (HMS).